


The Tell-Tale Cat

by lemonsharks



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Act III, Angst and Feels, Banter, Cats, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Kittens, Not Happy, Secrets, Use Your Words, chain of deals trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 17:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3456035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke brings home a kitten after spending a week running around collecting sela petrae and drakestone, in hopes that Anders will exercise a little caution, a little common sense, if he has a cat waiting at home for him. If he won't do it for her. </p><p>(It does not, in the end, do a damned bit of good.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tell-Tale Cat

There's drakestone dust beneath her fingernails, in her _pores_ , clinging to her lashes. Anders at the head of their little band, spring in his step, with Varric and Aveline between, while she trails. They don't talk much on the way back into the city; Varric's boots are thick with sand and Aveline could've died a happy woman, not knowing what the inside of a spider that large looked like. 

Hawke keeps an outburst back, a scream and a kick, back _behind_ the dust and buried away beneath the raw ache at the base of her skull. They'll have rain tonight, she can feel it; her knee hurts, the one she broke at fourteen when Carver threw her into the lake and she hit a rock going down, instead of the sandy shore. 

They part at the city gates; Anders would have her go with him to his clinic, but—

"All I want now is a bath, love. I'll see you tonight."

"I'll hurry home. We _do_ need to talk."

And he _smiles_ , a cracked grin that he couldn't peel away if he wanted to. A grin she's not seen often, that reaches his eyes with a flicker-and-gone, lit bright, and fading away.

She sheathes her sword at her back and lets her shoulders drop, ignores the blister forming against a ragged interior edge of her boot. 

And she walks. Hawke doesn't go home, there's—Anders _talks_ of trust. He speaks with all the self-assurance of the righteous. All the weight of a man who's spent his life settling for good-enough, for hidden, for not-seen and not-caught, who's settled and can't _settle._ Who's fallen so deep in with the heady rush of his own words, his own, his own— _lies_ , she thinks, and bites her tongue. He's so convinced he'll never have air that he keeps sucking in lungfuls of ocean.

_That proverb sounds better in Rivaini._

He'd said two nights ago that he didn't want to put any more lines around her mouth, and she'd bitten back how she's noticed the white threads on _his_ head, her doing. 

Hawke has thirty-one years to her name, a dent on her tongue from holding it so often between her teeth, and no _idea_ how to _talk_ anymore. Six years ago, seven, eight, she'd have showed up at the clinic with a bucket and soap and set to work washing bandages and bedclothes, trading stories. Her exploits in Lothering, lazy quiet days with her family, for his daring escapes and near-misses on the road. Tonight, she'd arrive and find him bubbling, half-skipping from one patient to the next, frenetic with plans and assemblages that make her insides twist. 

Elegant waves to her on her way up the steps. Hawke returns the gesture and hesitates, turns around and jogs to her old acquaintance’s stall. She looks older, as they all do. She's chipped a tooth since the last time they spoke; Hawke doesn't ask after it. 

"Have you seen anyone with a cat about? Younger is better, but if someone has an older beast that's friendly, that they can't afford to feed…?" Hawke asks, because maybe, perhaps…

"Not me, but Coral down on Tanner's Alley might have," Elegant says. 

Hawke thanks her, and leaves her with a bag of the gemstones she's collected up and down the Wounded Coast, a handful of silver tucked into the bottom beneath them. By the time Elegant notices she'll be too far off to hear, she hopes.

She turns heads in Lowtown, as she did when she worked for Athenril, after the first six months or so. When the reputation started to precede her. 

And now, she smiles and nods and talks briefly with the folk who flitted in and around the edges of her life for three years, nearly four. Gives Gamlen a wide berth when she sees _him_ arguing with a butcher, lets him pretend they didn't see each other. It's better, that way. She'd quietly reinstated the stipend her grandfather had called for, of which Gamlen said nothing and Hawke required no thanks. 

Better, this way. _Better_. If she thinks it enough it'll be true.

Coral on Tanner's Alley still has a kitten, but she wants Hawke to find her son—he's twelve, already stealing, already drinking at the Hanged Man, and Coral wants him home. Hawke agrees to the task, finds him just gone when she gets to the tavern. 

Varric is asleep at his writing desk when she goes to fetch him, fingers and one cheek covered in ink and a whole bag of drying sand spilled on the floor at his feet. She badgers Isabela into going with her instead, darts out to the Alienage where Merril is plucking her laundry down off the line. 

"Do you think this shirt has faded to much to keep wearing?" she asks, but she dumps the whole basket on her bed and grabs her staff when Hawke tells her about the missing boy. 

"Word has he's down at the docks," she says. 

Three scuffles, a bribe, and a bloody nose—hers—later, they've found the lad and _he_ won't go back to his mother til they've retrieved his lucky bandana from the bruiser who'd won it off him in a rigged dice game last week. 

"We _could_ just tie him up and haul him back home," Isabela says, sounding bored. 

"Where's the fun in that?" Hawke replies. 

The bandana is harder to come by than the boy. Getting 'hold of _it_ involves scaling a building (the blister bursts while she's on the ledge), illegally entering a tenement apartment, and buying it off a horrified-looking sixteen-year-old in a full face of makeup. And that's _after_ the original winner tells them he gave it away. Coral's son goes back to her with a minimum of fuss; Coral hands over the kitten, and Isabela declares that this was both more and less excitement than she really wished to _have_ today, please and thank you. Merrill follows the pirate into the pub, and Hawke hisses when tiny kitten claws dig into her bare arm through her carry-all. 

She has Sandal draw up a bath; not for her, but for her new young charge, and she loses more flesh and blood here tonight than she did killing the last three dragons she encountered. 

The cat's all fluff and skin, ridiculous-looking and starving and wet and pathetic. It—she—scratches and bites and yowls against the indignity of warm water and the horror of a fluffy clean towel. Hawke had thought her soot-black when she took her, but sees now she's a plain brown tabby with a white belly, and lamp-bright eyes that remind her of Bethany. 

Hawke scrubs her down with the flea ointment Anders makes up here— _it's cleaner_ —for his clientele in Darktown, and rinses her off one last time. The cat gets run of the room afterward, while she drains the tub and fills it again. For the better part of an hour, Hawke soaks away her day, her _week_ the last _ten years_ , and Thunder barks and whines outside the door. Her fingertips trail outside the tub, nails scraping the floor, and the kitten butts her hand with its head and makes a tiny squeaky demand of a sound. 

She has teeth, so she'll eat fish or fowl rather than needing milk from a rag every few hours, which is itself something of a relief. "Meow-meow," Hawke replies, "You're hungry, I _know_ , we'll do something about that right away."

And then the little blighter bats at her fingers once, twice, _scratch;_ they'll have to teach her better. 

Anders doesn't hurry home that night, but Hawke waits up, dozing off and on in her chair in the library. She stirs when Bodahn gives his greeting, and the kitten has found _her_ place on Hawke's lap. Her mabari sits by the fire, his shoulders bunched and his head cocked to the side, looking up with a deep sense of betrayal in his brown eyes. The kitten is _vibrating_ on her legs. 

Hawke has heard of purring as a thing cats _do_ , but never owned a cat, never sought one out. Full of Hightown's very best squab, clean and dry and warm, _this_ cat has closed her eyes and decided to forgive. 

The conversation in the entry dies, and Anders pads into the room. He stops a step or two from the doorway, sets his staff down with a thunk on the floor and a clack as the head hits the wall. 

"Milady Uses-Her-Toes was very excited to meet the last cat-fancier in Kirkwall," Hawke says. Her arms with all the evidence of this afternoon's struggle are streaked livid-red and punctured from needle-claws and teeth. 

"Why have you done this?" Anders asks, into a very long pause. 

"You miss having a cat around. You said so a couple of weeks ago."

He looks from the kitten, now stretching, now hopping down from her to the ground, to Hawke's face, and to the kitten again. His shoulders tighten; his lips thin. Thunder approaches the kitten with his rump in the air, and when she hisses he gets on his belly and whines, pathetically.

Anders turns away, and back, arms crossed over his chest and head shaking. He says, "No, no, it isn't that. It isn't only that—"

Hawke could lie, and a lie forms on her tongue. She rolls it around in her mouth and swallows it back. She could lie, but that's what he's been doing since—that's what she's been fighting _._

_"I thought,"_ she starts, and there's a way she could go, a way that wouldn’t hurt as much. A way that grinds down the edge of fear that's grown and lays curled down inside her belly like a sliver of metal, cutting her from the inside out. Hawke clears her throat. "I thought, that if you had a cat waiting for you at home, you might exercise a little caution out there. Show a little sense. A little restraint."

Anders kneels on the floor, and clicks his tongue. From somewhere, he produces a lopsided leather ball with a couple of pebbles inside. The cat approaches him, wide-eyed. She meows in a curious sort of way. 

Hawke continues, when he says nothing. "I thought you might for her, since you've made it so abundantly clear that you won't for me."

He opens his mouth, but she's gone—walking first, then running—her tongue is thick with things she can't take back, her dog is at her heels, and the only place she can stand to be right now is _out_.


End file.
